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Remember that wonderful scene in the mess hall in Joseph Heller's Catch 22 when Maj.—de Coverley, the wreck of a war-scarred officer who had such a fierce visage that no one in his company dared ask him what his first name was, finds himself confronted by an edict that everyone had to sign a loyalty oath before they got any chow? Major—de Coverley stormed to the front of the long line of hungry soldiers with growling stomachs fruitlessly waiting to be served, and demanded, "Gimme eat." After a quick glance over his shoulder, he added "Give everybody eat."

What triggered that delicious memory (we haven't read the book for gosh knows how many years) was last Thursday's lunch at the White House for Mitt Romney, hosted by Barack Obama. Both the president and his opponent in the recent election wore big smiles and tiny flag buttons and each was accompanied by a nondescript chap who wore a serious expression and no flag button. These sober strangers hovering discretely over the diners were, in case you wondered, professional food tasters, and no self-respecting high official would leave home without one, especially when he was about to break bread with the very person he had so soundly beaten at the polls.

It was all part of the president's charm offensive (he still has heaps of the stuff left over from his campaign) and a desire to made good on his vows to seek bipartisan counsel from the Republicans in formulating a policy to deal with the problems he somehow managed to overlook during his first four years as the nation's chief exec. You know, like that strange concoction, the fiscal cliff, designed by sadistic economists and gleefully brandished by politicians to scare the dickens out of the populace or that tinderbox primed to break out at any moment into a raging conflagration: the Middle East.

This was, so far as Obama & Co. were concerned, make-nice-to-the Grand-Old-Party week, which was no longer so grand and somehow seemed a lot more decrepit than it had been a scant week or two before. But the era of good feelings evaporated like a splash of water in the midday sun, after the first handshake between John Boehner, the GOP boss of the House of Representatives, and the president. Undeterred, Mr. Obama continued to chirp that the attempts to maneuver around the fiscal cliff were going swimmingly, while Mr. Boehner expressed a slightly different view; to wit: They weren't going anywhere.

Both estimable gentlemen, they nonetheless did not quite share the same perspective in reaching their conclusions. Mr. Obama was under the impression that he had won the election and had first dibs on what should be done. Mr. Boehner, in response, asked "What election?" The stock market duly dipped when Mr. Boehner held the microphone and warily recovered when the president claimed the spotlight.

It didn't help soothe an already palsied market that the tide of government and industry reports, depending on the day or even the hour of their release, helped lift or depress investor spirits. Early in the week, seemingly heartening news came in the form of an upward revision of third-quarter GDP growth to 2.7% from the previous reckoning of 2%. Further scrutiny, alas, took some of the glow off the figures when it revealed that the bit of a rise came in no small way from companies stocking up for a holiday surge that was curtailed by Sandy, a climb in exports that may not be extended, and nice doses of government spending. All suggesting what the data giveth one quarter, they may take back with a vengeance the next. On that score, Ed Hyman's ISI Group sees the possibility of the current-quarter GDP posting an anemic 1% rise.

While the past few weeks' economic numbers have tended, not surprisingly, to trace the economy's recovery from the superstorm, it emerges that consumers have turned parsimonious again. Their outlays, far from setting any worlds on fire, actually contracted a fraction or two, along with the size of their paychecks. Besides the littered legacy of Sandy, consumer-price increases, and the fear and loathing of the fiscal cliff merit a chunk of the blame.

Our precarious perch, which is a great place to watch the fiscal drama unfold, unfortunately provides no clear view of what might transpire between now and the end of the year, when the draconian fiscal measures are due to become law unless the fractious powers-that-be come up with some desperate plan that would win the nod to avoid the encroaching cliff and a conceivable lapse into recession.

The so-called smart money in Washington and Wall Street is thoroughly convinced that a heroic last-minute effort will avoid that calamity. Which all by itself is enough to keep us awake at night, long after we've laid our weary head on the pillow.

WHILE WE'RE MUMBLING on about the fiscal cliff, it dawned on us that though it's something just about everyone is aware of and a mere mention of was sure to scare the kiddies on Halloween, it's kind of the Big Foot of economics, widely imagined but never seen. So we got to thinking that it couldn't hurt to share with you a kind of primer on this hair-raising creature, especially since Allen Sinai, a fine chap and top-notch practitioner of the dismal science, offers one in his latest commentary for Decision Economics, where he's a big pooh-bah.

The term was first uttered by that famous wordsmith Ben Bernanke, whose day job is running the Federal Reserve. Allen notes that the concept took on fresh meaning and wider usage in 2011 as an incentive for the administration and the House Republicans to agree on lifting the ceiling on Uncle Sam's debt. The idea was, we suppose, that if faced with some absurdly horrid alternatives, our chosen representatives in Washington would have to come to their senses and cobble together a reasonable blueprint for deficit reduction. The fatal error here apparently was the assumption that the solons have senses to come to.

If, by chance, Congress and the president continue to contrive to get each other in a headlock and let the deadline of Jan.1, 2013, slip by, then the next sound you hear will be the citizenry screaming bloody murder. And not without cause. For under the present law, Allen relates, in next year alone taxes would grow a tidy $335 billion, while government expenditures would shrink by $165 billion, putting quite a dent in GDP, something like three or four percentage points. Looking out a bit, over the next 10 years—no gritting of teeth, please, unless your son-in-law's a dentist—you can anticipate nearly $5 trillion in tax increases and something over $2 trillion in government spending cuts.

We'd hate to give you the impression that Allen doesn't appreciate that such a— shall we say?—stringent fiscal squeeze would have some good effects. On the contrary, he says, "For sure, such a contraction in fiscal policy would go a long way toward solving, or postponing a day of reckoning on, the U.S.'s sovereign-debt problem. But, he concedes, at the same time, "it would abort the U.S. upturn, produce a recession, not just in the U.S. but around the world, and be associated with huge losses in economic activity." And, oh yes, as you might suspect, equity bear markets would be the rule from one end of this troubled little planet to the other.

So the Punch-and-Judy show going in Washington stacks up as a real, honest-to-goodness cliff hanger.

THIS IS A BELATED SALUTE to Kate Welling, a distinguished Barron's alumna. That sounds a tad stuffy, but it's certainly applicable when addressed to a former managing editor of the magazine, who some years ago chose to strike out on her own and is editor and publisher of Welling on Wall Street, a first-rate fortnightly aimed primarily at institutional investors. Kate is a terrific reporter, with an extraordinary knack of filtering out the fluff that the Street dishes out to the inquiring journalist and zeroing in on the hard, cold facts.

Each issue is distinguished by a typically crackerjack Q&A, in which she somehow persuades even the most recalcitrant portfolio manager to open up and spill the real beans on why he owns or just dumped something. She inevitably manages to winnow out the investment gems that the pro being grilled would just as soon rather not talk about, if only because he or she wants to buy more of it.

Along with the feature interview, Kate festoons every issue with relatively short takes from a roster of well-known and well-regarded analysts, economists, and strategists. By way of example, in her latest offering, fund manager John Hussman, who has compiled quite a record over the years, explains why he is unapologetically negative on the market. John acknowledges the usual concerns—the fiscal cliff, a possible flare-up of European banking and sovereign-debt strains etc, etc. But he asserts, the primary reason he's defensive is that stocks are overvalued .

John is a mix of market technician and historian, as well as a seasoned strategist, and we can't do full justice to his cautionary arguments in the space we have left. Among other tell-tale elements, he notes that market conditions have moved in a two-step sequence from overvalued to overbought. Toss in "an army of other hostile indicators," along with a "breakdown in market internals and trend-following measures," and you have fair warning. Once in place, he says, that sequence has generally produced very negative outcomes. He adds that his estimates of prospective stock-market return/risk remains among the most negative he's observed after examining a century of market data.